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spidweb writes "The online backlash against DRM has gotten a bit excessive, especially since the purpose of DRM is entirely admirable: to stop thieves and free riders and to help creators actually get paid for their work. This blog entry calls attention to XBox Live, a place where strong DRM is helping to encourage quality games at low prices which make money for their developers. Quoting: 'If I could snap my fingers and give myself the same absolute control over the games I make that XBox Live has over theirs (in return for lower prices), I would. The freedom of the current system is nice, but it comes at too high a cost. Honest people need to pay extra to subsidize thieves. The unfairness is just this side of intolerable, and it's only getting worse. DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.'"

Why would the "thieves" need to be subsidised? What costs are they incurring? Bandwidth? Aren't they all self-distributing with bittorrent, taking a load off the developer's servers? Clearly they should be reimbursed for this valuable service?

Exactly. Why should I be penalized for a game that not enough people want to buy.

What they are missing are the number of "pirates" that download games to make sure they aren't a pile of crap and can run on their system. I purchased one game that was labeled as vista compatible without verifying. Well can't get my money back now.

There is a quick and easy solution to this sort of piracy: release demos again. I was bored and downloaded six demos off steam of games that I was unlikely to purchase. Now I own three of them and the developers are all getting a cup of coffee on me.

because of DRM. I use more than one system. I do not wish to load the game on the disk and still keep the DVD in the drive. I don't like to be kicked because some stupid punkbuster program gets it wrong! I'm not a thief don't treat me as such!

I like getting paid for my work. And I think that game developers should get paid for their work too. Please point out where in my statements I say that game developers shouldn't get paid for their work.

As for working for companies that make closed source, I don't really enjoy it, but companies that make their money from Open Source are hard to find. They exist. Red Hat is doing very well. But most people seem to have the same fear driven mindset that you do and seem to think that producing Open Source software means they can't get paid.

Several of the companies I worked for produced software that I felt could have been sold as Open Source and done just fine or better than they were doing. One of the customers of one of the companies I worked for actually went to the trouble of debugging all of our poor SQL queries for us. It would've been so much easier for all involved if they had just had the source code themselves. I campaigned for this inside those companies.

Several others have been companies that made perfectly valid internal use of Open Source software, like Amazon.

Since when can't you backup DRMed media? In most cases backup is easy - you just need the keys to use it. Contrast with older, non-DRM techniques which use things like deliberately defective media, which are difficult to copy or backup, so you do need the original media, unless you hack it.

First sale doctrine is a RIGHT, not a "privilege". DRM makes people mad. And lastly, I think this whole 'pirate' definition is skewed. To me a pirated game is one that is copied, repackaged, and sold as if it were genuine. Getting a copy for free, trying it, and deciding you don't like it is a whole different matter. Just because some one is playing a game you developed that is a copy of one that someone bought does not in my mind mean that person would ever be a customer. Maybe he/she thinks the game is ok, but not good enough to pay for. My guess is that most people, if they really like something will buy a copy for themselves. Thinking some one owes you money for some peice of crap game just because the tried a copy is off the wall to me.

My problem with DRM has nothing to do with wanting to distribute content illegally, defend pirates or any other such thing. My problem with DRM is that in an attempt to stop the theives, the companies are treating the legitimate customer like crap! When DRM measures first came out I frequently found that the so-called license to the music that I purchased didn't actually work the way it was supposed to. I had to purchase several songs multiple times in order to run it on different devices, even though the licenses were supposed to transfer. In short, bugs in the implementation were ripping ME off. I didn't rip off the company. Similarly, when Vista came out with a large amount of DRM integrated into it, I found that certain functionality that was important to me broken or removed. In particular, I had a lot of trouble playing certain kinds of media files even though I had legitimate ownership of them. I even created some of them! As far as I am concerned, I have NO sympathy for the media industry as long as they continue to cheat me.

The thing is, any DRM scheme can be cracked and it seems any DRM scheme WILL be cracked. You name it, it seems to have been busted. So this means that the people who wish to illegally copy a game can. They just go to one of the many sites offering it and get it. They are then not inconvenienced, since their copy has the DRM removed. However legitimate gamers, well those people it hurts. They have to deal with the DRM restrictions. It makes their experience worse.

That's the situation I find myself in with a number of games these days. They are protected with SecuROM or TAGES or the like that require online activation, and only let you activate a few times. Well, that is not acceptable to me. I need to be able to play the game many years down the road. I like replaying games. So, there are games I just won't buy. Dawn of Discovery would be one. It really interests me, however I won't buy it because of the DRM. I suppose I could copy it, but I don't like doing that.

So DRM hurts the legit customers, not the infringers.

That's my biggest problem with it. If you actually could show me a DRM scheme that was 100% unbreakable, ok then maybe I'd give it some credit. After all, if you really could ensure that people HAD to pay for your product, perhaps it would do some good. I'd still want to see a real study showing that it does, but at least it would be possible. As it stands now, your DRM can and will be bypassed, which means that it only hurts people who actually pay.

I'll even meet the developers and publishers half way. If DRM makes them feel warm and fuzzy, ok I can deal with it if it is non-intrusive. Impulse GOO is one I'm ok with. It doesn't bother me, it doesn't limit my installs, so it is fine. I'm not a zealot, I'm willing to compromise. However these ultra-restrictive DRMs do nothing to stop the copying, and just piss people off.

Part of the problem is that developers need to stop seeing infringers as potential customers. While some might be, many aren't. In many cases if you made it so they couldn't have the product without paying, they'd simply do without. As such you can't look at all the number of copied software and say "We are losing all these sales," because you aren't. You need to worry about not pissing off paying customers. You don't want me angry with you, I spend a lot of money on games, but I WILL (and have) take it elsewhere if your DRM messes with my ability to play.

you dare to speak the truth, i'm suprised yor arem't modded troll of something as stupid.

the group think here is very much as you describe - don't worry about pirates, but if/.er's were spending 10 mil on developing a title only to see it on pirate bay for free i reckon they would sing a different tune. just look at how they react to gpl infringements....

I disagree with you. There is a scarcity and it is skilled developer's time. Software development isn't the kind of domain where you can pay lots of low-skill, cheap, developers to replace a few highly skilled developers. They'd probably expect 60k (low end) - 100k (moderate end). Skilled programmers if not paid well or interested, will probably move somewhere else, and that costs more money to orient another employee to their work. Now if you have ~10 people on a project that spans 2-5 years, you're looking at a few million in development, not counting marketing, publishing, and lawyers (for miscellaneous legal negotiations). This implies that you should sell a few hundred thousand copies to break even. Some IPs can do this easily and others cannot. That being said, if developers came up with an ideal piracy-prevention method, it could mean the difference between staying afloat to produce another game or closing shop. This is, perhaps why some companies see DRM as a necessary evil: It annoys a small population of consumers, but might give them a better chance at surviving the fiscal year.

You don't have a right to make money; so if you're selling an intangible product, you need to add value that makes purchasing the product attractive. In the past, when EA was "Electronic Arts", they took an approach where they treated developers like talent, and put their names and pictures in boxes and printed manuals. Packaging was creative and attractive, and the manuals, maps, etc included with the product had a certain value.

The cost was alot less as well. $30 was probably the average cost for a new computer game. Now, in an age where almost all technology-related costs have plummeted, games are easily double that.

IMO if you want to make money, you either need to add intangible value-adds, like packaging, manuals, maps, stickers, comic books or have online subscription or expansion options that allow you to pull down revenue for an extended period of time.

I bought World of Goo in part based on all the interest around it, when they did their pirating blog post or whatever. I played it for a few hours, finished it in a single day IIRC. I haven't replayed it.

In terms of total game time and replay value, it was not nearly worth it. Compare it to a game like Far Cry 2 - my current replay favourite, I love crossing the beautiful countryside avoiding the guard station hazards - and there's simply no comparison. Far Cry 2 is worth 50x World of Goo.

If you do not stop pirating games, all console games will transition to a thin-client model - similar to the way MMO games operate. You'll pay subscription-based access in order to play games. You will never own them.

You will buy a box that does IO - processes inputs and does basic rendering operations. All the game logic and levels will live and run on a central server - and will never be transferred to a computer that end-users have access to.

It doesn't even need DRM to work - just strong authentication security. And that's the future of the commercial videogame market if you fuckers don't stop stealing games. Pay for games - or don't play them. Period. Your "but I have the right to try it for as long as I want" bullshit is wearing thin.

Really punkbuster (PB) got it wrong? What has that to do with DRM or the game companies or this thread? Don't install it then, as the game works fine without it.

So MeNeXT a little education. The game companies pay EvenBalance because the gaming communities and especially the game server admins wanted it and still want it. That's obvious by the number that turn it on and have done so for years now. Those admins don't have to use PB. It's also primarily for the game server admins, leagues, and the players only by extension. Those same game servers that cost those admins a lot of money to run every month. Those admins are normal everyday people, that are paying for those servers out of their own pocket. Those very same servers that you play on for free!

Perhaps if you would take 5 minutes of your precious life to read how to use the client. Then take 5 more to set your game up to play with the settings the server admins will allow on their server, then you perhaps wouldn't get kicked. But if you are trying to tell me you get kicked a lot because of PB, then you are either extremely lazy, the only one of an unlucky few, out of multiple 10's of millions using it regularly, a liar, or a cheat. Lazy there is no cure for. Of the unlucky few, there is a cure. If a liar, again no cure. If a cheat, then it's a self esteem issue so get help and in the mean time, stay off those servers or those admins will use PB to do it for you.

If you are cheating, then you have no sympathy and no right to play on their PB enabled servers to begin with. Those admins have the right to keep you off their servers. The is no sense of entitlement there. Go play on servers that don't use PB then. There is no need for you to go on punkbuster enabled servers to play your game. It will play just fine without PB.

I work with (not for) PB everyday across many thousands of servers and have for years. I see what goes on with many millions of clients. I know very well the error rate with PB and it's very low. I have the stats so I know why technical kicks happen and it's usually the clients fault and sometimes the admins, or the server has purposely limited some settings for a reason and the client needs to match them to play on it. So they are there for a reason. You sir are just whining about a minor inconvenience if you are getting technical kicks that are easily solved and/or you are just not understanding anything about how to use PB. If you don't make a minor effort, then PC games perhaps aren't for you and especially PB enabled ones, so play on consoles. Instead of making an exaggerated statement. If you really wanted help to solve any kick issue, but you are to lazy to read the manual. There is plenty of assistance at a few major websites on the net that will assist you. This is where google is your friend. You can manage google, right?

Just curious since you work for Spiderweb....
Does SpiderWeb use DRM now? I've played demos from Avernum and Geneforge (Geneforge is great, I just haven't ever gotten around to buying it) and found them quite fun. So I'm just curious about what wonderful "extras" I might get if you use DRM before I buy anything.

And anyway, I speak for PC gamers when I say you can take your "major game developers" - we don't want them. These companies have been churning out wildly successful but completely inconsequential titles for years. Fantastic graphics, a hundred voice actors, celebrity scifi writers.. It's like a summer movie. It's awesome, funny, whatever, but months later you've completely forgotten it. Hundreds of summer movies roll by, each with their flashy effects and compelling premise and stratospheric budget, and they're all the best movie ever but they're all indistinguishable.

Not only that, but if they release a game that's in a genre that's got any traction at all on the PC it usually gets ported to it anyway. The argument that they started developing for consoles because of PC piracy is bogus, because most of the big, say, FPS games on the consoles get ported to the PC, too.

"Honest people need to pay extra to subsidize thieves." -- why? Honest people are perfectly capable of paying the same amount of money to subsidize thieves. It's not like most the thieves were ever really going to give you money anyway. And they laugh at your DRM and attack it with 1337 h4x0ring and steal it anyway.

Is your point that the pirates simply wouldn't play games if there was a fool proof way to stop piracy? Does that mean that you would also stop watching movies and reading books or listening to music? I still remember the first movie I ever bought. It was $19.95 and I was thrilled I could actually aford to finally buy a movie. Before all the piracy people didn't live in caves they simply saved money until they could aford what they wanted. No one had 20,000 song collections. Some how we made it through the day and I think overall people were happier. I'm facing a personal decision. For years I depended on outside financing but for the first time I had the resources to self fund one or more entertainment projects. There are several directions I could focus on but each has a high risk of piracy and there's a serious risk of loosing money because of the changing markets. I've made a number of films over the years and the last two were heavily pirated. It largely destroyed the independent foreign market. I've considered producing several games but there's a risk of piracy even before it's on the market. All it takes is one programmer who decides to post it for kicks and the value is cut drastically and I might not even be able to get distribution. I heavily researched starting a small publishing company but the future is uncertain there as well. Piracy isn't a big bite yet but it's on the rise and even corporations are lifting material. It takes a good five years to get a new business established and I can't be sure any of the areas I've considered will be viable in five years for a small company. I even have access to several highly talented bands that could do very well but music is the toughest of the lot. In the end rather than invest in entertainment I'm likely to go with a more traditional business. I know several ones that interest me and they lack the downsides of entertainment.

The whole point is a lot of people are facing the same decision right now and more all the time. Piracy is changing the volume of content and quality of content and the changes have all been for the worst. The talent pool is already eroding so the content will continue to suffer. These days it's a lot more satisfying selling an item that people need rather than entertainment. If I sell a gallon of biodiesel or a bag of wood pellets for a furnace and charge slightly less than the market price people are thrilled. If I offer a film at half the cost most people are selling theirs for people will still mostly pirate and rationalize the behavior. No one debates that a gallon of fuel is stealing but they will rational stealing a movie or game because it's been ripped from the media. I've got the same investment either way but at least one people can tell the difference between stealing and not stealing. Even if only a few percent represent lost sales some times that's all the profit margin you have and why would people provide entertainment if they loose money in the end?

In the future, signing with a record label for a few albums is probably going to be looked at the musical equivalent of college. That's like saying "Oh, well, it sure is easy for a Doctor to get a job at a hospital. They've already been to med school!"

Unless bands get really creative with how they promote themselves and distribute their music (and thankfully, a lot of bands are doing this), they're going to have to drop a couple albums through the big corporate machine before they can be successful as independents. Not everyone can be as lucky as Jonathan Coulton.

The Xbox makes me feel a bit conflicted about DRM. The reason being that (more or less as the original article is pointing out) some of the uses of DRM on Xbox live arcade seem a bit less evil than you'd expect! For instance, they offer me the convenience of renting movies from a moderately sized catalog, for non-ridiculous prices, without going to the video shop. That's quite nice and it's something that would seem a bit silly to offer without DRM (unless you just streamed it, in which case quality might suffer). Generally I'd say that if you need DRM to enforce your policy then your business model probably isn't right - and to a certain extent I think that applies to online movie rentals; if you're giving someone the data you can't really make them give them back, unlike a physical disk. But in this case the Xbox isn't trying to con me, it's upfront about the cost and the fact it's just a time-limited rental. I just don't feel offended by it, the way DRM on a purchase would bother me.

However, XBox Live does really worry me in other ways. For instance, they recently added the ability to buy full released games via download. This might be marginally more convenient than going to the game shop every few weeks to pick up a new title. However, you lose the ability to resell the games or lend them to people *and* you're not only asked to pay more than a second-hand copy of the games would be - the games I've looked at are charging more than I payed for a *new* copy. Admittedly I bought those games during a sale but I got a real physical disk that I can even lend to friends and resell. The prices they're charging are possibly fair in the sense of "I feel I got enough enjoyment in return for what I paid" but they're out of proportion to what I can get elsewhere. They're entitled to try this and see if it works but when I think about a future when the console vendors control all prices, sales and resales my knees get all wobbly and I have to go play Halo to relax.

The other things that bug me about Xbox live's DRM / pricing include the fact that MS points are sold in inconvenient multiples, making it easy to have some left over. And also the rumours I've seen recently that they pressure DLC providers to charge money, so as not to create the expectation of free stuff. That's a rip off.

At the end of the day, the Xbox has plenty of DRM and, like the author, I find some aspects of it not entirely intolerable. It still annoys me and I hope that some of their more greedy efforts to extend Xbox Live fail commercially. But it's less obnoxious doing it on an Xbox where I (personally, others may get a nasty surprise) knew what I was buying into, as opposed to pushing DRM on my PC which cost me more money and came with the expectation I could run what I wanted.

This DRM/security etc stuff that Apple has for the iphone has only been a royal pain in inconviencing me during my development of the games..... however as soon as any of my games have been released, pirated copies have instantly appeared on the internet/bittorrent. The existence of these hacked copies is not really something that has bothered me at all, but in any case, the point is, that all this DRM only tends to inconvenience the honest user/developer, while not stopping the 'thieves' anyway.

The same logic of DRM only inconvencing honest users without stopping piracy has also applied in my experience with CDs (the last CD I bought in a shop had copy-protection mechanisms preventing me from ripping it, so I had to download it illegally just to put it on my computer+mp3-player, which made me realise there was no point left in legally buying the things), DVD-region-based-restrictions (I live abroad, and I stopped renting DVDs in germany and switched to downloading movies, as I got so sick of the DVDs available in germany mostly not having the original-english audio at all due to licensing crap) etc

And how many make money from giving works away for free? The question isnt whether they were able to give it away, but whether it was commercially viable, which it isnt (in the short term) for those up and coming artists. It may make them money LATER (through publicity) but it makes them nothing now. "Nothing to lose" doesnt mean that the lost sales from giving stuff away will for sure be made up in increased sales later.

Record companies sell millions and millions of copies of a song for $1 with virtually no distribution costs or anything.

Their distribution cost is completely irrelevant. Its a straw man's argument. Likewise is their profit. For it to be even slightly topical is to argue the free market and capitalism is wrong. Are you saying no one is entitled to make a profit?

Imagine if record companies sold songs for $.25 and put them on a server where you could download them if you lost them. In other words 100% DRM free with even assisted recovery of your files

We can already imagine that with iPhone and Android applications. While not 0.25, piracy is live and well for $0.99 apps which have very real costs associated. People pirate because they feel entitled, not because of price.

They are the people that would never have bought music to begin with.

Yet another lie pirates tell each other. If they would have never bought the song in the first place, they would have listened to it once, deleted it, and never listened to it again. Like stock, they effectively devalued it. Go illegally grab up a bunch of stock and when you get arrested, tell them its all okay because you would have never bought it in the first place.

Apps get downloaded used once, then never used again.

Then you failed to read that issue seems to largely on affect iPhone users. And just the same, that's not true for all applications either. If the application remains installed, they are assigning value to it. If they use the application, they are assigning value to it. If an item has value, and it is obtained without paying for it, the item has been stolen. For IP, we call this piracy. For stock, its called theft, fraud and/or embezzlement.

Like the parent said: Give me a good value and the money will flow easier than ever.

Then that's you and not pirates. By you're own admission, you don't pirate. If you do pirate, by your own admission, you're lying to yourself and everyone else who reads your post.

Anyway, I googled to try to find some interesting surveys. Unfortunately, the only conclusion that I can come up with is that surveys are almost worthless. They're biased and seem to always support the views of the entity sponsoring the survey. Just searching for the UK survey mentioned by the GP, I found a survey sponsored by the music industry that shows even worse statistics on piracy and a survey from a group that calls themselves "The Leading Question" that state that CD sells are actually up and files sharing by teens are on the way down, which they base on a 1000 interviews from people aged 14-64... Why don't they ask a 1000 teenagers? Do they count file-sharers who counted in the older survey but are no longer a teenager but still file-share in the current survey? Why did they headline the teen statistics that seem to support their argument and gloss over the fact that the number of files-sharers in their survey population grew from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009.

So my question becomes, does the GP lack of references actually diminish his argument? I think not.

These links are just the tip of the iceberg. Google isn't hard to use. The question is, do you want to know the truth? If you do, its actually fairly trivial to piece the facts together with just about any search engine and web browser.

Beyond that, just about every lie pirates use to justify their position is easily blown out of the water with trivial research. The only valid questions which pertain to piracy, is how much is it actually inflating consumer goods and how much revenue is actually lost as a result of piracy. Just about everything else I can recall which is commonly thrown around is either a lie, a myth, or a straw man to keep you distracted from the truth.

And to be absolutely clear here, I absolutely hate DRM!!! But at least I'm pragmatic about why it exists - because pirates force it to be so. But I speak with my wallet, as you should too. If it has DRM, I generally don't buy whatever it is - and I don't steal it either.

Sloppy work. There is nothing about piracy in the links, the consensus is that android app store and 24 hour money refund policy suck and that Android customers are not excited about paying money for farting sound apps, something the Apple demographics goes for. And that high availability of quality free apps for Android undermines commercial software. One person in the comments section even proposed artificially sticking paid-for apps on top (coz they "get lost" in the midth of free software that provides the same functionality).